bombsaway wrote:The Soviet “Iron Curtain” can’t account for the silence inside Western-controlled sources that were never behind that curtain:
UNRRA / IRO case-files (Bad Arolsen, Germany, open since 1949)
Joint Distribution Committee emigration dossiers (New York, open since the 1970s)
Shoah Foundation interviews taken in Canada, the US, Australia, South Africa and Western Europe during the 1990s.
None of those repositories shows so much as a single liberated “German resettlement camp in Russia.” You need a mechanism that bridges both blocs, not one that stops at the Soviet border.
bombsaway, you're missing the forest for the trees. The Iron Curtain is a chokehold on information flow, especially in the immediate postwar chaos. UNRRA/IRON files and JDC dossiers rely heavily on what survivors reported or what Soviet authorities allowed to trickle out. If Jews evacuated eastward are under Soviet control -- whether in gulags, remote settlements, or just lost in the shuffle of millions displaced -- they're not showing up in Western records unless the Soviets want them to. And they didn’t. Add to that the Allies’ postwar agenda to pin everything on Germany with a unified 'extermination' narrative and there’s zero incentive to dig for “resettled” stories that muddy the waters. The mechanism isn’t some grand conspiracy spanning blocs; it’s shared interests -- Soviets hiding their own messes, Allies pushing their propaganda, and Jewish orgs curating victimhood for political capital. No "bridge" needed; just overlapping motives and a black hole of data.
bombsaway wrote:Yizkor volumes were an anarchic grass-roots project. Some were printed by tiny landsmanschaften in Brooklyn, others by kibbutz collectives in Israel, still others by socialist Bundists in Paris. Hundreds were vanity-published on shoestring budgets. The texts contradict each other on dates, spellings, even pre-war population size -- proof that no central commission harmonised their contents. If a single survivor community near Minsk or Vyatka had existed, its landsmanschaft would proudly have produced a memorial book (and begged for restitution on the back cover). None did.
You’re romanticizing the Yizkor books as some pure, untainted folk effort. Yes, they were often small-scale, but they weren’t free of influence. Major Jewish organizations post-war -- e.g. World Jewish Congress or early Zionist groups -- provided funding, distribution, and editorial guidance to many of these projects, even if indirectly. Contradictions in details don’t mean lack of coordination; they mean the harmonization was on the big picture -- loss, victimhood, and “extermination” -- not minutiae. A resettlement community in Minsk or Vyatka wouldn’t get a Yizkor if it didn’t fit the narrative being cultivated for reparations and Israel’s founding. Plus, survivors from such areas, if they existed, were likely still under Soviet grip or too fragmented to organize. Your “proud landsmanschaft” fantasy ignores the reality of suppression (and disarray).
bombsaway wrote:Two problems with that arithmetic:
The gulag figure you quote (16 memoirs ⇒ 0.005 %) is off by a factor of fifty; Memorial’s 2003 bibliography alone lists 700 + gulag memoirs. Using 700/16 million gives 0.004 %—still tiny but not vanishing. Apply 0.004 % to 500 000 alleged resettled Jews and you expect two hundred memoirs, not twenty-five.
Inflation by solicitation matters. The Shoah Foundation did not cold-call only ghetto survivors; it chased every living Jew with a wartime story. If 500 000 Polish Jews were alive in post-war Russia, roughly 50 000 made aliyah. Foundation field-teams blanketed Israel between 1994-2000. A random-hit rate of just 5 % would yield 2 500 video testimonies describing German camps in the Soviet interior. Result on the VHA database: zero.
Nice try with the number games, but you’re still inflating expectations and flubbing basic math

. First, I never based my 0.005% on just 16 memoirs; I adjusted earlier figures to focus on unsolicited testimony, conservatively estimating around 0.005% as a benchmark for organic storytelling rates. Your “corrected” 700 gulag memoirs over 16 million still yields a tiny 0.004% -- barely a blip, and still not far off my point. But then you botch the calculation: 500,000 x 0.004% isn’t “200 memoirs”; it’s
20. So the denominator goes down. Adjust further for Jewish collective incentives to align with a victimhood narrative, lower survival rates in harsh eastward evacuations, and Soviet censorship, and even your inflated expectation collapses well below the 10-20 range, essentially
vanished.
As for Shoah Foundation solicitation, you dodge my core point: centralized outreach enables filtering. They’re not “chasing every Jew”; they’re curating stories that fit. A 5% hit rate assumes random sampling and zero bias -- laughable when Yad Vashem and similar groups have an evidently vested interest in a singular genocide tale. Zero VHA hits for “Soviet interior camps” reflects narrative control and the tiny fraction of ‘survivors’ actually interviewed (50+ years later) likely being clueless about their own locations, or otherwise motivated/incentivized/misled to speak along certain lines.
bombsaway wrote:To delete a living person’s entire life story you must:
Bind every acquisitions editor in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, Polish, Russian, German and French presses.
Police vanity presses and self-publishers (Amazon KDP, Lulu) after 2000.
Track and digitally erase PDFs uploaded to Archive.org or plain HTML memoirs posted on 1990s GeoCities sites.
Purge stray “I was east of Smolensk” references from Pages of Testimony submitted directly by families (no editors involved).
We have examples that slipped past all editorial filters—survivors who swear they watched soap made of human fat or saw electric conveyor-belt executions—yet not a single survivor remembers “the Vyatka colony.” Editorial gas-lighting cannot be 100 % selective on one motif only.
You’re straw-manning hard here. I never said every editor or platform needs to be “bound” or policed (nor that we are “deleting lives”; though nice attempt at affirming the consequent and emotional appeal). Most survivors don’t even know where they were -- sealed trains, obscured destinations, wartime confusion. No need to “erase PDFs” when the story never gets written. And when it does, the publishing world -- especially in Israel or Jewish-heavy Western circles –
self-selects against narratives that clash with the sacrosanct Holocaust story. Our estimates show they’d only have a tiny handful at most to have to weed out; and even less if they knew something we don't about survival rates of the ‘survivor’ group in question (perhaps explaining why Jewish organizations got a sudden booming interest in testimony-mining in the 80s-90s). Your soap and conveyor-belt examples prove my point: absurdities get through because they amplify victimhood, while a mundane “resettlement” tale risks diluting it. It’s not 100% selective gaslighting; it’s cultural and institutional bias doing the heavy lifting. No conspiracy of “digital erasure” needed -- just disinterest and disincentive.
bombsaway wrote:Precisely. Bundesentschädigung pensions and later Article-2 payments are public-record: ≈ 620 000 Jewish claimants since 1954. If another million Jews liberated from German camps lived on Soviet soil (or emigrated to Israel in the 1970s-90s), Claims Conference lawyers would be beating down their doors; the Conference’s entire raison d’être is to collect more names, not fewer. The compensation rolls stopped growing because no further pool of survivors materialized.
Wrong again. The Claims Conference isn’t some neutral truth-seeker “beating down doors” for every Jew. Their mission hinges on a specific victimhood narrative -- genocide, not resettlement. A million Jews on Soviet soil, if they existed, are either dead, suppressed, or uninterested in claiming when it risks clashing with the established story. Plus, Soviet-era Jews emigrating in the ‘70s-’90s aren’t rushing to advertise wartime “resettlement” under Germans if it means bureaucratic scrutiny or social ostracism in Israel. Compensation rolls stopping isn’t proof no survivors exist; it’s proof the system prioritizes a certain type of survivor story. You’re blind to incentives.
bombsaway wrote:Glad you made a cursory attempt to answer this but yeah this shows the depths of naivete and delusion we're working with. Upon liberation (assuming the Germans kept the Jews in the dark about location - this wasn't the case - they were told they were being sent into Russia) by Soviets she wouldn't find out she was being kept somewhere in the USSR? You are in la la land.
Spare me the condescension, bombsaway. You’re the one in la-la land assuming every liberated Jew gets a geography lesson from their Soviet “saviors.” Even if some were “told” they’re being sent to Russia (which is generally not true; many reports from Jews in ghettos indicating their expected destinations were vague, e.g. 'going to work in the East') this means jack, in any case -- most were disoriented, shuffled through sealed transports, and dumped in unfamiliar hellholes with no signage or context. Even post-liberation, Soviets aren’t handing out maps saying, “Welcome to Vyatka!” They’re controlling info, relocating people again, or just leaving them to fend for themselves in vast, war-torn territories. Esther likely knows she suffered, not where. Your belief in crystal-clear self-awareness among traumatized survivors is the delusion here. Try grounding your hypotheticals in the chaos of 1945, not some tidy textbook fantasy.